Learned Helplessness

Stephen Bau -

We were born helpless. Then we were conditioned by our polluted media ecology to remain helpless. Photo by Irina Murza on Unsplash.

Corporate Monopoly on Public Discourse

The corporate monopoly on public discourse and the learned helplessness of their target markets is by design.

DRILLED – S3, Ep 1: The Father of Public Relations – 16:23
<p>In this season we’re tackling Big Oil’s big propaganda machine—its origins, the spin masters who created it, and why it’s been so effective. It all began more than 100 years ago with Standard Oil, John D. Rockefeller and his son, a bloody miners’ strike, and the very first P.R. guy, who swooped i…
RadioPublicCritical Frequency
Climate change science goes back decades ⁠— and so does climate change skepticism, says historian | CBC Radio
Climate change denialism has been around for years. And it’s still here, even after four decades of scientific consensus that humans are causing the climate crisis. But why? Harvard science historian Naomi Oreskes explains in a public talk how denying climate change came to be a personal and politic…
CBCCBC Radio · Posted: Sep 27, 2019 4:00 AM ET | Last Updated: July 16
The Origins of Specious: Climate Change Denialism
Climate change denialism has been around for years. And it’s still here, even after four decades of scientific consensus that humans are causing the climate crisis. But why? Harvard science historian Naomi Oreskes explains in a public talk how denying climate change came to be a personal and politic…
CBC
Merchants of Doubt
The U.S. scientific community has long led the world in research on such areas as public health, environmental science, and issues affecting quality of life. Our scientists have produced landmark studies on the dangers of DDT, tobacco smoke, acid rain, and global warming. But at the same time, a sma…
Bloomsbury PublishingBloomsbury.com
We have been conditioned by our social systems into a state of learned helplessness. We have resigned ourselves to powerlessness because we have been told that the only forms of agency we have are democratic suffrage and industrial production. We vote once every four or five years, and we make our contribution to society through our production capacity to support the economic engine of the nation state: the corporation.
A time to tear down and a time to build
The design industry faces a reckoning. We either continue to build the fascist empire of corporate control or we dismantle it by refusing to offer our labour to perpetuate the existing systems.
ImaginaxiomStephen Bau

Outsourced Sensemaking

Outsourcing our sensemaking capabilities to politicians, public relations representatives, advertisers, marketers, and media personalities has created a population of spectators who feel helpless in the face of social, economic, political, and ecological breakdown.

The Coronation | Charles Eisenstein
Covid-19 is showing us that when humanity is united in common cause, phenomenally rapid change is possible. None of the world’s problems are technically difficult to solve; they originate in human disagreement. In coherency, humanity’s creative powers are boundless.
Charles EisensteinHelen says

Canada’s Apartheid

Canada was designed as a means of legalizing the theft of land, the elimination and assimilation of Indigenous Peoples, and the extraction of resources for the British Crown and its corporations. It continues to operate exactly as it was designed 153 years ago.

Extraction Empire
Globally, more than 75% of prospecting and mining companies on the planet are based in Canada. Seemingly impossible to conceive, the scale of these statistics naturally extends the logic of Canada’s historical legacy as state, nation, and now, as global resource empire.
ImaginaxiomStephen Bau

Reimagining Our Social Architecture

The solution is to redesign everything that has been designed to distract us from the power of imagination and of organizing and coordinating our actions. This is a moment to reimagine our social architecture.

Design for Resilience
The design community is discovering their own complicity in propping up corporate and capitalistic hierarchies that are increasing inequities, maintaining oppressive workplaces, and limiting opportunities for learning, collaboration, autonomy, and creativity.
Social ArchitectureStephen Bau